Excess
by yaksa
Summary: Tweek hates coffee. It's almost like the house is soaked with it. He can smell it in every room, every crack and crevice like some kind of pervading entity. [creek][present tense]


Tweek hates coffee. It's almost like the house is soaked with it; he can smell it in every room, every crack and crevice like some kind of pervading entity. He wakes up in the morning to it, the musty, oily odor that leaks in his door from the kitchen and grabs hold of him. He still drinks it every time his dad sets a mug of the stuff in front of him. He can't stop. He dreams about it sometimes, the ugly smell and the bitter taste and sometimes he's drowning in a sea of it and he can't wake up.

He cuts himself accidentally in the kitchen (his hands never stop shaking), and somehow he's surprised that it's red that leaks out of the tip of his finger. He bleeds blood, not coffee. He reads in his biology book that blood is mostly water, and he decides that his is mostly coffee. It's inside of him and he kind of hates that. It makes him wish he could get it out somehow.

---

Mr. Mackey gives the class another of his rambling lectures on drugs. Tweek's head is buzzing, that drained, trembling feeling he gets when there's too much caffeine in his system and it's all he can do not to explode. He listens because he has to. The whole room is humming with energy and if he doesn't concentrate on something, he knows he'll go insane.

He swallows a manic whine as the counselor writes on the board, white power sprinkling down to fill the eraser shelf. The chalk squeaks and Tweek flinches like he's been hit with a lead pipe. Everything feels burned into his brain. He's queued to some higher plane and every noise and every motion registers like over-exposed film. He's hyperventilating and he closes his eyes and counts backward from twenty; ever so slowly.

Somewhere around fifteen a pamphlet lands on his desk. Tweek jerks, eyes open again and hands fumbling to grab it, passing the extra behind him and staring at the clean computer print (Veranda). It takes a moment to get past that, and then he realizes it's the same pamphlet he's gotten every year since fifth grade. 'Say No To Drugs!' in bold black letters, underlined in red. At least seven different drugs are listed underneath; side effects printed out in neat italics and at the bottom of the thing, 'death' in a font the color of cyanide. It's always disturbing how close some of those side effects are to his daily life. He jerks and crumples the edges of the pamphlet, staring at the front of the classroom and trying not to think anymore.

---

He sits with Craig, Clyde, and Token at lunch. Pip is somewhere doing something and Tweek stares at the mystery food that sits in front of him. Red plastic tray on the white of the lunch table. The world is starting to look like normal film again, and Clyde is talking about his girlfriend while Craig throws rolled up straw wrappers at Cartman's head, the table behind them. Tweek's limbs feel leaden, and it takes him extra effort to eat and pay attention to the other boys.

"You need to cut back on the caffeine, Tweek," Token tells him and he laughs nervously and can't help but agree. He wants to say that he can't, that he's tried and it just leaves him puking in the bathroom for hours he'll never get back in his life. He thinks sometimes that if he could just replace the coffee with something else, maybe he could grasp at some of the normalcy his friends have. But Cartman finally turns around and curses Craig out, and Tweek chokes on his words as Craig flips the fat kid off and suddenly they're fighting, punching each other in the aisle between lunch tables.

Later on something connects in his head and he slips his hand into his desk to grab for the crumpled pamphlet again. Maybe replacement isn't as hard as he thinks it is. But the guilt hits him in the chest and he cuts that train of thought short as his desk snaps closed again.

---

At home he sits at his desk at three in the morning. The clock is ticking and he's deathly tired, but like usual he can't sleep. It's been two days since he slept last (really four, but the days seem to melt together and he's never sure his count is right), and every time he closes his eyes he sees an ocean of stale, oily coffee. The pamphlet catches Tweek's eye; he set it on his desk and hasn't moved it or even thought of throwing it away. His fingertips shake as he reaches for it, two tries before they actually close over the glossy paper and he pulls it toward himself.

There's a stain on his floor, old coffee he spilled there last week and he smells it even now. It makes his stomach turn and his head hurt, and suddenly he decides that he wants out of this rut. He doesn't want to feel this way anymore and he crumples the pamphlet in his hand just as the lights go dead.

Power outage. The next day he hears that Kenny fell into the generator while showing off to some girl.

---

Tweek counts his money and folds the bills as neatly as his shaking hands can. There's a number in his head and his stomach is aching and he chickens out twice, hyperventilating once he gets inside his room and sits with his back to the door. But the whole house smells like coffee and he hates himself for being such a wuss.

It's a Thursday. He stands behind the school, hands in his pockets so he can't see them shaking. That nervous twitch has fired up in his eye, and he just swallows to keep up that false air of calm. He drops twenty bucks on his first bag of cocaine. The kid that sells it to him eyes his hands as he takes the money, shooting him a wry smile as he disappears back around the corner of the gym. Tweek all but races home, the bag closed in his fist. He bites back a yell as his mom surprises him in the kitchen ("How was school today, honey?"), answering with something he'll never remember before disappearing upstairs to lock his room from the inside.

The drugs sit under his mattress for a week before he gets the courage to take them out again. He falls asleep on Saturday and dreams about a frozen wasteland. On Wednesday he's up at two again, his hands trembling from the caffeine as he drags paint over a canvas to try and calm himself down. _Too much_; the phrase keeps repeating in his head like a mantra and he adds yellow to the palate, biting his lip until it bleeds—

-

Euphoria. Tweek loves that word. He stares at it, giggling and mouthing the syllables. It's almost all vowels and it's beautiful and elegant and it makes the colors on his canvas sparkle and swirl. The room is buzzing, hot like an oven (like the inside of a smelting furnace, productive as it pours liquid metal into lead molds to set) and he can feel it in the backs of his eyes. The house doesn't smell like coffee anymore. It smells like ice cold wind, the white pith of lemon rinds, the tingling of menthol cough drops (clearing everything out, replacing everything with perfect simplistic happiness). Time is frozen and he's invincible and he owns the whole world. He can do everything, and there's paint everywhere and he just can't stop laughing.

-

—Tweek wakes up in the morning with his head pounding. It's not like normal, that hollow drumming under his temples. This is like a semi ran over his head and the sound of the crash is still echoing around inside his skull. He feels sick, and when he rolls over he just lays there, one arm hanging dead off the side of the bed as he stares at his alarm clock (still going off because he can't find the energy to reach up and hit snooze). There's paint on his floor, on the wall in a few places. Tweek doesn't look at the canvas; he's almost afraid that if he looks, the whole picture will shatter and he'll never get that feeling back—he was flying last night and it's the happiest thing he can remember in a long time. He feels like shit, and he swallows a lump in this throat, just breathing.

---

Geometry. He hates the class and today he can't even look up at the board. His head is still pounding and his eyes hurt when he opens them. Craig keeps throwing paper at his head but he doesn't care. He's too dead; it's like there's no energy in his body and somehow his hands are still shaking. Caffeine buzz, everything tuned up a few notches. But it's nothing compared to the high of last night, and somehow Tweek finds the energy to grin to himself and doesn't realize he's giggling until he gets sent to the principal.

At lunch the four other boys stare at him. Some of the crash has worn off. His head is still pounding, but his limbs feel more normal and he's ravenous. He didn't eat breakfast this morning.

"You look absolutely dreadful, Tweek," Pip says and Clyde chimes in with, "Yeah. You look worse than usual."

His hands are shaking as he sets his milk down and he just looks at them and fights off an uncomfortable laugh. "It's nothing, you guys. New blend of coffee." And his eye twitches and he barely bites back a nervous yelp.

---

Tweek stares at his ceiling, watching the pattern of cracked plaster and the way the paint bubbles around the corners of the room. He feels guilty, except he doesn't. He feels guilty because he's supposed to feel guilty about something like this. He's supposed to feel bad about the cocaine, about buying it in the first place and wanting to do it at all. But he doesn't. He just feels calm inside, something he can't ever remember feeling before.

"It's because I chose this," he says through clenched teeth, swallowing and breathing the freezing air that spills in his open window.

The coffee was his dad's; he'd set a mug of it in front of Tweek every morning and watched as he drank it, lecturing him about the beauty of the beverage. Tweek never told him that he hates how it tastes and smells. But this is different because the drugs are his choice. He picked this himself and somehow he feels exhilarated by that fact.

---

His history class gets assigned a group project. Craig waves him over to the corner of the room where Clyde and Token have their desks pushed together. Clyde laughs at Pip ("Groups of four, class,") as he wanders around the room, looking for another group to take him in. It's due tomorrow, which is impossible considering the amount of work to be done, and the four of them decide to spend the night at Tweek's house: coffee at the ready.

After school they buy poster boards and glue and throw them down on Tweek's floor. Clyde boots up his laptop, sprawling out on the floor in front of it as Token reads the assignment off the handout for the fifth time. Tweek lets Craig have his desktop. His hands shake too much anyway, and he just scrawls down notes as they work through the research. The other three boys start yawning even before ten, and he goes downstairs to make coffee, his hands trembling as he pours the grounds into the machine and turns it on.

Token types up the written portion of the project as the rest of them glue pictures and blocks of text to the poster boards. Tweek feels useless. He clenches his hands in his lap, willing them to stop shaking enough so he can help, but that never works. Instead he cuts stuff out and hands it to them. Craig's on his third cup of coffee and it's two in the morning and he can just tell how tired everyone is.

"Here you guys, how's this?" Token asks, turning the laptop so the rest of them can read what's on the screen. They crowd around and Tweek reads the first few paragraphs before Craig says, "It's fine. Just print it so I can go home and sleep," and Clyde and Token take the computer downstairs to the office to hook it up to the printer.

Tweek can still hear them going down the stairs as he sits back on his swivel computer chair, one leg pressed to his chest that he clutches with white knuckles so his fingertips stop shaking. He can smell the cold coffee that sits on the desk and his thoughts drift off; colors are spinning in the back of his mind and Tweek doesn't realize that Craig's digging in the drawer of his night stand until the other boy jerks his head back and says, "What the fuck?"

He chokes on his own breath, heart suddenly racing as he sees the bag of cocaine held between two of Craig's fingers. Tweek falls out of the chair, ripping the drugs away and just breathing as Craig watches him. "Shut up," he chokes, "It's nothing. Really."

"Nothing? Jesus, Tweek," Craig bites, grabbing a pillow from the bed and throwing it at him in disgust. He manages to catch it somehow with his shaking hands, one of them shoved into the pocket of his jeans and gripping the bag of coke (if he crushes it hard enough, maybe it'll disappear).

"Just don't say anything, all right?" he manages to say, voice squeaking as he gasps at air that seems thicker than anything in the world. "All right?"

Craig just squints up at him, angry and annoyed with his arms crossed over his chest. Tweek can hear the other boys coming up the stairs again and it feels like his heart is going to beat right out of his chest. Panicking, he says, "Craig?" and the other boy frowns and waves a hand at him and says, "Whatever. Just get more glue."

Tweek blinks, realizing that was all Craig was looking for just as Clyde comes in the door. He swallows and nods; "Yeah, more glue. Sure," and disappears out the door, pushing past Token on his way down the stairs to his dad's office.

They finish the project by four. Tweek lets the other boys out and locks the door behind him, turning around and sinking down to hug his knees in the dark stillness of the empty house. All he can think about is Craig's face and that challenging, interested look in his eyes. He's terrified; he feels sick in more than one place and the drugs are still in his pocket, burning a hole through his jeans as if everyone knew they were there. "He won't say anything," he whispers to himself, sucking in air and trying to convince his mind that what he's saying is real.

---

At school the next day he can't stop staring at Craig. The other boy notices by second period and punches him in the arm, hissing, "I didn't tell anyone. Stop staring at me," in the din of the crowded hallway. Tweek swallows and rubs the bruise on his arm, nodding and apologizing too many times. Next period he stares at his notebook instead, scribbling random nonsense with his pencil because it's less stressful than listening to the teacher. His mind wanders when he does that and he feels sick every time he remembers the doubt in Craig's eyes when he'd asked him to keep quiet.

He isn't hungry at lunch. Clyde rambles on about school gossip and Tweek watches as his fingers shiver a little. Pip looks better rested than the rest of them but Token laughs at him when he says his group didn't finish the project in time. After fifteen minutes of staring at his tray of food, Craig punches Tweek in the arm again and tells him he'd better eat it. That focused warning is in his eye again and Tweek swallows and takes a bite out of his pizza and chews, watching the other boys out of the corners of his vision as he concentrates on his food.

---

Somehow the week slips by without everything going to hell. On Wednesday Tweek catches Craig at his locker and can't speak until the other boy flips him off and rolls his eyes.

"You're not gonna say anything, right?" The words fall from his lips and Tweek fights off the feeling that he's lost something.

Craig just shrugs and shoves a book into the back of his locker. "Hell if I care that you're fucking up your life. Just don't come running to me later. I don't wanna hear about it," he says, eyeing Tweek sideways. Somehow he can't believe what he says, though. He catches Craig watching him in class (ignoring Stan as he makes obscene gestures at him under his desk) and pretends not to notice when Craig's too distracted to answer the teacher's question two seconds later.

Tweek works at the Harbucks for a few hours after school on Wednesday. The traffic's usually light enough that his dad gave him the time slot. His hands still shake and he bites his lip until it bleeds almost every week as he takes orders. He hates the complex coffee recipes and he burns his hands twice as some of it spills over the lip of the paper cup. He gets distracted mixing a Spice Latte and as he sets it down in front of its owner he sees Craig and the other guys behind her.

"Hey you guys," he manages to mutter as Craig frowns, ignoring him and leaning against the counter to stare at the menu posted somewhere behind him. Clyde and Token order and toss their money at the register before wandering off to grab one of the empty tables. Tweek chews his lip (it hasn't started bleeding yet, but he still has an hour before he's off), watching as Kyle pushes out the door and leaves the bell tinkling.

"Just give me something with chocolate," Craig says eventually, shoving his cash across the counter in annoyance. Tweek takes it and punches it into the register and goes to make their order.

A few minutes later he sets the drinks down in front of Craig and notices that the other boy is watching his hands. Tweek's nails are bitten down and ragged, scabbed in places; blue-black paint is smeared in the knuckles of his right hand and his fingertips never, ever stop shaking. His eyes go wide and he jerks his hands back, hiding them under the counter. Craig meets his gaze and Tweek sees a creepy fascination underneath whatever it is he's trying to project before the other boy grabs the coffees and says, "Thanks," turning away.

---

It's almost two in the morning and the drugs are just starting to kick in. Tweek can feel his heart racing and the room feels too hot as the colors start to swirl. He's standing in the middle of the room, giggling under his breath and grinning. The light overhead is buzzing louder than he's ever heard it before and he can't help but watch the imaginary sparks that drift down from the bulb (ashes falling, death and rebirth all in one beautiful package). He can barely control his hand; the paint goes everywhere and the canvas is a portal into some beautiful, perfect world. He's almost there, almost to that place where he can fly and he's invincible and he can do anything at all.

Something's tapping. He realizes a moment later that it's rocks hitting his window and he whirls around to stare at the pane of glass until another pebble smacks against it. Tweek falls forward, almost tripping himself as he scrambles onto his bed and pulls the window open to peek out (frozen wind biting in the dark). It takes a moment for his eyes to focus, but then he sees Craig standing in the snow on his front yard and the breath sticks in his throat as he panics.

"Come let me in," the other boy says, juggling an extra rock and Tweek's almost paranoid that he'll throw it at him.

"W-what?" he asks, stumbling over the word. His lips are already starting to go numb and he blinks twice to try and clear his vision. "Come downstairs and let me in," Craig repeats, twisting the rock between the fingers of his gloves. "I want to try it."

A car blows through the red light at the intersection and Tweek jumps as the motor guns loudly in the silent air. Everything's suddenly frozen and he has to pry his shaking hands from the window sill. His breath puffs out in white clouds and the air in his room is way too cold; the canvas is covered in ice-blue and ugly grey as he steps across his carpet and opens his door.

Craig throws the rock over his shoulder as Tweek cracks the front door. They stare at each other for a long moment, breathing white in the frozen air before Tweek steps back and holds the door open. Craig won't stop staring at his eyes, some creepy affinity in his gaze that Tweek tries to chalk up to his dilated pupils. But he feels more than a little sick as he follows the other boy upstairs, his stocking feet louder than a thunderstorm on the carpet and his heart beating out of his chest.

The room is cold and Craig stands in the middle of it, hands in his pockets. "You paint?" he asks and Tweek throws a paranoid glance at the canvas before nodding. His stomach is churning and he tries to convince himself it's because of the paint thinner in the air. He almost feels compelled to explain himself, but Craig's eyeing the cocaine on his night table and Tweek knows he doesn't care.

He wants to ask why, why Craig's here at all when he seemed so repulsed by the drugs in the first place. But his tongue is numb and he just walks over to the night stand and divides the powder into two lines. His hands are shaking and his heart is racing as he snorts the line through a green Harbucks straw and hands it off to Craig to do the same. The other boy sneezes a few times and Tweek can't help but giggle. His head feels light even if his stomach is churning and he rubs leftover powder over his gums and sits on his bed.

Craig just stares at him, wiping his nose and eyeing the window like he wants to close it. Tweek remembers that it's open and he falls back and stares at the pane of glass, tilted in so it catches the orange light from the streetlamp and shines it on the ceiling of the room. It almost seems to spectrumize (psychedelic rainbow sprawled across the cracked plaster), and he has to fight off the urge to paint. He catches a glimpse of his hands and suddenly can't stop staring at them. They're slathered with paint and somehow the colors are swirling together like a coral reef. He bites his lip to keep himself from laughing and he isn't quite sure if it hurts or not.

It takes a few minutes for Craig to start to feel it. Tweek watches him, trying to lie still even though time ticks slower than ice and he feels like the air is buzzing. He wants to get up and move and paint and use up this beautiful productive energy before it slips away again. He can feel it bursting in his chest; Craig sits down on the bed, says, "Whoa," and the giggle finally breaks out of Tweek's mouth. After a moment the other boy sprawls out next to him and stares at the ceiling. His heels are up on the mattress as his ankles flex away nervous energy.

The world starts spinning and Tweek has to fight to stay still. He can see colors in the back of his mind and he almost believes he can hear his paints calling him. They sound like an out of tune trumpet, discord because there's someone else in the room and he can't paint that way. But he can hear Craig breathing faster, and somehow that calms him down enough to keep still.

Tweek doesn't know how it happens. Craig suddenly runs his fingertips over the wrinkled green fabric of his shirt and then Tweek realizes exactly how close the other boy is. He can feel his breath on his ear and his hand is burning against his stomach. Fingertips slide up the side of his arm and Tweek watches as Craig touches his hands. They're crossed over his chest, clenched together, and he sees the paint smeared on his shirt and realizes that it's still wet. A smudge of yellow lifts off on Craig's forefinger and then he leans over, the blanket pulled taut beneath them as he presses his lips to Tweek's.

He gasps a little (Craig's a thousand degrees and suddenly Tweek feels like he's an icicle). He tastes blood on his tongue and as Craig pulls back a little he sees it on his lips. He's been biting his lip too hard and Tweek's heart is pounding as Craig licks the blood off his lips and leans down again to kiss him.

He tastes lemon rinds; an odd, bitter, tingly sensation that Tweek knows is mostly the cocaine in his mouth. All he feels is pressure against his face because his lips are numb and he doesn't realize that they're open too until Craig's teeth clack against his own. Tweek breathes and tilts his head back, opens his mouth and kisses Craig and somehow this doesn't seem strange. The air is buzzing again (the droning sound of a fly trapped against a screen door), and Tweek almost swears Craig's hands are hotter than the sun. His own hands are clamped on the other boy's collar and he's sure he'll never be able to open them again. He sees sparks against his eyelids as Craig presses him against the mattress and slips his hand under his shirt.

Tweek sucks in air around Craig's mouth and opens his eyes as the other boy's nails drag across his skin. Craig pulls back, looks at him for a long moment before he presses forward again and Tweek kind of forgets that the clock is ticking up on his wall and that the room is as cold as winter.

Maybe the cocaine isn't his alone anymore, but this is okay and he's never had anyone pay so much close, personal attention to him before in his life.

---

He hates that he can't stop sobbing as he comes down. He curls up like a sick cat and the room is so fucking cold and somehow he can't make himself crawl under the blanket where it's warmer. Craig just watches him, still riding off the end of his high and Tweek hates him for a moment. He's still grinning and it feels like Craig's laughing at him even though he knows he isn't. There's no cocaine left and Tweek feels all the energy and all the happiness leak out his fingertips and bleed into the mattress. His head is pounding and when Craig runs his fingers over Tweek's shaking hands he can't help but sob into the blanket.

When Craig starts to come down Tweek just watches him, even though his eyes feel like they're on fire. Craig doesn't cry, he doesn't even move. He just lays there staring at the door as the energy drains out of him and Tweek hates that he feels so vulnerable. Somehow he falls asleep even with the raging firestorm in his head. When he wakes up Craig is gone and the room is cold enough that he sees his breath when he breathes—but the blanket is pulled up to his chin and Craig's gloves are on his hands and even though he's dead tired he can't help but smile.

His canvas lays paint-side down on the floor when he finally finds the energy to get up. Downstairs, his dad hands him a mug of coffee and tells him he needs to sleep more. Tweek drinks it down without tasting the disgusting flavor for once and thinks that maybe the coffee isn't the worst thing in the universe anymore.

* * *

Thanks so much for reading, you guys. Reviews and concrit pretty much make my day, so don't be afraid to leave something. :3 

-V


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